TricareÂ’s new Â“closed networkÂ” for Tricare Sub-Standard Philippines; What we know and how it will accelerate the death of U.S. Military retirees By Kenneth J. Fournier (Kennyfour09@yahoo.com.ph) In an effort to cause more pain and suffering upon the U.S. Military retirees living in the Philippines, Tricare is now poised to implement, a new, extremely restrictive Â“closed networkÂ” for Tricare Sub-Standard in the Philippines. On top of tricareÂ’s current inability to provide the promised, and legally mandated, medical care to retirees including the slow payment of claims, a requirement to use only Tricare certified providers listed on a provider list that...

More gay men reported being cancer survivors than straight men in a new study from California. That suggests they may need targeted interventions to prevent cancer, the researchers said, but more studies are needed to answer lingering questions. For example, are gay men more likely to be diagnosed with cancer than straight men? Or, are they just more likely to survive if they do get cancer? "A lack of hard data" on how sexual orientation affects the risk of cancer is "one of the biggest problems we have," said Liz Margolies, executive director of The National LGBT Cancer Network. Margolies,...

....“This is another safeguard to ensure that we are providing the proper care to the correct person and that the person receiving the care is the correct person,” says Dr. Robert Trenschel, senior vice president and administrator, Ambulatory Care Services, Harris County Hospital District. To illustrate the need to positively identify patients and ensure that each has their corresponding electronic medical records, consider these facts: * Number of patients in the Harris County Hospital District’s database: 3,428,925 * Number of times when two or more patients share the same last and first names: 249,213 * Number of times when five...

California will spend $2 billion more per year on Medi-Cal when federal health care reform goes into full effect in 2016 and $4 billion more annually by 2020, according to a Rand Corp. study released this week.

A former supervisor in the Dayton VA Medical Center’s dental clinic blamed intervention by the NAACP for foiling his efforts in the early 1990s to remove a dentist whose lax infection control practices put patients’ safety at risk. Dr. Dwight M. Pemberton continued to practice dentistry at the Dayton VA, often failing to change latex gloves and sterilize dental instruments between patients...Between 1992 and July 2010, 535 patients who had invasive dental work by Pemberton may have been exposed to bloodborne pathogens, the VA said. Nine have preliminary positive results for hepatitis B or hepatitis C. In the early 1990s,...

Scientists are reporting the first evidence that consumption of a healthful antioxidant substance in apples extends the average lifespan of test animals, and does so by 10 percent. The new results, obtained with fruit flies -- stand-ins for humans in hundreds of research projects each year -- bolster similar findings on apple antioxidants in other animal tests. The study appears in ACS's of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Zhen-Yu Chen and colleagues note that damaging substances generated in the body, termed free radicals, cause undesirable changes believed to be involved in the aging process and some diseases. Substances known as antioxidants...

An individual mandate has done little to stem the rate of medical bankruptcies in Massachusetts, boding poorly for the federal healthcare reform law enacted almost a year ago, according to a new liberal study. The number of medical bankruptcies in Massachusetts increased from 7,504 in 2007 to 10,093 in 2009, while the state’s rate of medical bankruptcies experienced a “non-significant” decrease from 59.3 percent to 52.9, said researchers Dr. David Himmelstein and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler in the American Journal of Medicine. The authors, both affiliated with single-payer advocate Physicians for a National Health Program, said medical bankruptcies continue to plague...

Gordon Duffy was a freshman assemblyman from the San Joaquin Valley in 1966 when then-Gov. Pat Brown and the Legislature fashioned a health care program for the poor named "Medi-Cal." Medi-Cal would take advantage of a newly minted, obscure provision of the federal Medicare program for the elderly, leveraging the promise of federal money to extend care to poor Californians who hitherto had been dependent on medical charity. Duffy, an optometrist who later chaired the Assembly Health Committee, recalls that the Medi-Cal program was launched on assurances from Brown that it was affordable and workable. "No one in the world...

Establish smart spending habits. Live like you're poor. How do you do that? Drive your cars into the ground, don't eat out very much, avoid expensive and potentially unhealthy processed foods, buy food in bulk, buy just enough clothes to fit your needs, and use public transportation. ... Use credit cards only as a convenience to avoid carrying cash; limit your credit card spending so that you can easily pay off the balance each month. Make every dollar count with your spending, so you can free up money to invest in the future. Get healthy. One of the best things...

The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is investigating whether some of its doctors wrote fake sick notes to people protesting the governor's plan to strip public union employees of the right to collectively bargain. Over the weekend, FOX News reported that doctors from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine were manning a doctor station to write medical notes excusing those protesting at the Wisconsin State Capitol from work. Physicians were seen standing on a street corner wearing lab coats and giving out medical notes.

(CNSNews.com) - U.S. health care providers and health plans have two years left to adopt a new federally mandated system of medical coding--the shorthand used to list what's wrong with a patient and how much that patient should be charged. The new, vastly expanded coding system is intended to improve disease management, disease monitoring, and health care reimbursement. This will be the first major overhaul of the medical coding system in 30 years, and it is separate from the government’s push to have health care providers switch from paper records to electronic health records.

The woman who authorities say killed her teenage daughter and son because she was fed up with them talking back and being mouthy will not appear in court Saturday because she's being treated at a hospital for an unknown condition. Authorities say Julie Powers Schenecker was taken to Tampa General Hospital shortly after midnight Saturday to be treated for a medical condition that existed before she was taken to jail. Hillsborough Sheriff's deputies — who oversee jail inmates — said they could not reveal Schenecker's medical condition, citing health care privacy laws. An arrest affidavit said Schenecker shot her son...

Starting at 10AM we will present a special edition of the Jim Vicevich Show. Sandra Raymond, from the Lupus Foundation of America will be joining us, as well as Lisa Sartorius, the President of the Connecticut Lupus Foundation, as we take some time to raise money for Lupus research. Click here to contribute. Look for the “DONATE NOW” on the left hand side of the donate page. Read more about Lupus below the fold. As many of you may know I have Lupus. Lupus (SLE, CLE, SCLE) is a debilitating autoimmune disease, and while it’s affects on each individual can...

I recall in the 80's there being alot of hub-bub about DMSO (Dimethylsulfoxide) being used as a pain reliever for arthritis and general snake-oil for what ails ya. Well, in the 80's I was in my 20's and early 30's, so I never paid much attention. Plus, these were the very early days of the internet so info was basically what you saw on the local news, and not much else. Now, however, being in my 40's (just kidding... do the math!!) I have some minor aches and pains and perhaps early arthritis. Not much, but enuff to make me...

In Texas, a Catholic bishop made two hospitals cease doing tube-tying operations for women who are not going to have more babies. In Oregon, another bishop cast a medical center out of his diocese for refusing to discontinue the same procedure. In Arizona, a nun was excommunicated and the hospital where she works was expelled from the church after 116 years for allowing doctors to terminate a pregnancy to save a woman's life. Such disputes between hospitals and church authorities appear to be arising because of a confluence of factors: Economic pressures are spurring greater consolidation in the hospital industry,...

(Reuters) - Once a year, every year, Professor Thomas Borody receives a single-stem rose from one of his most grateful patients. She is, he says, thanking him for restoring her bowel flora. It's a distasteful cure for a problem that's increasingly widespread: the Clostridium difficile bug, typically caught by patients in hospitals and nursing homes, can be hard to treat with antibiotics. But Borody is one of a group of scientists who believe the answer is a faecal transplant. Some jokily call it a "transpoosion." Others have more sciencey names like "bacteriotherapy" or "stool infusion therapy." But the process involves,...

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to review California's controversial proposals to cut Medicaid reimbursements to physicians, dentists, pharmacies, health clinics and other medical providers. The court's decision to hear three combined California legal challenges is good news for Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who wants to enact budget cuts similar to those that courts have previously struck down. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. "The fact that the court agreed to hear these cases is a big and important step for California," Elizabeth Ashford, a spokeswoman for Brown, said Tuesday night. The court's decision also could please...

Dr. Andrew Wakefield's 1998 report in the journal Lancet purporting to show a link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella "was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud," says Dr. Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal, in an editorial published Tuesday. The editorial accompanies the first of three reports by British investigative journalist Brian Deer that document how Wakefield manipulated data in his attempts to prove something that he "knew" before he started his research. Most of the information in the reports has been published previously, but...